Cosmopolis

Friday, February 20 - Saturday, February 21, 2015

DCP projection

“This is a steely, chillingly topical adaptation of Don DeLillo’s satirical novel about Eric Parker, a young billionaire fund manager who spends a day being ferried across midtown New York to visit his hairdresser. At the same time, he watches his personal and business fortunes go up in smoke due to the unexpected rise of the yuan; a crucial irregularity that Packer failed to spot.

“As Packer’s journey slowly progresses he meets friends, business associates and his young wife Elise (Sarah Gadon). A doctor gives Packer his daily check-up in the back of the car, which involves a rather intimate personal examination. “You have an asymmetrical prostate,” he says, and Packer looks perplexed.

“This goads Packer into a kind of nihilistic audit of his own psyche, and later his body, testing himself as he would a financial market; finding its limits, looking for patterns, guarding against irregularities. Much of the action takes place in the limousine itself, which Cronenberg styles the car as a kind of airtight cocoon that glides silently through the city and is run from a bank of blue-glowing, Star Trek panels.

“Inside, Packer can access everything he needs: market data, food, alcohol, sex, a toilet. No exterior noise makes its way in, even when at one point he is caught up in an anticapitalist protest, and a giant, Chinese dragon-like rat puppet starts buffeting the limo. The mob hammers silently on the windows, and Packer sips another vodka. It’s a smart inversion of Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ: rather than being umbilically connected to a virtual world, Packer is hermetically sealed off from the real one. ” – The Daily Telegraph